


bellyache

by unerv



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Healing, Force Visions, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Romance, Sexual Content, Temporary Amnesia, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-06 21:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15203876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unerv/pseuds/unerv
Summary: Kylo Ren crash-lands on Jakku. He has no memories of his past or of his family, no idea who is or where he came from. Rey feels his pain pulsating all the way across the desert. It guides her to some unknowable place in her gut that has always been there, dormant. But now, something in her is awake.





	1. Prologue

She wakes up with sand in her mouth. 

Rey blinks, slowly, methodically. The world blurs, spins, tumbles over itself and she squeezes her eyes shut, breathing harshly. She aches all over; her lips are cracked, and her throat is so dry that she can barely swallow. Rey takes a shuddered breath, digging her fingers into the sand, feeling the grit on her skin and the pink sunburn blooming along the exposed parts of her arms and legs.  She’s still dizzy, and it takes her several minutes to push herself up without the overwhelming urge to vomit. She sits, amid the sweltering heat of Jakku, looking up at the stars. 

Rey lowers her gaze to the horizon, wipes the sweat from her forehead, and tries to remember how she got here. She frowns with the effort of it, but her mind remains blank. 

She must have passed out from dehydration while scavenging. It makes sense, Rey reasons, though usually she’s more careful not to venture too far without enough water. She hasn’t survived so long on her own by being reckless, after all. 

The canteen tied to her waist is indeed empty. She doesn’t remember drinking it. Doesn't remember why she’s out after sunset when she knows from experience that nothing good ever happens to a girl alone at night in the desert. She flexes her fingers, wishing she had her quarterstaff. Wishing she had a clue where she was or what she was doing before she’d fainted. The surrounding terrain all looks unfamiliar. There isn’t a ship carcass in sight, but she must have been scavenging — it is, well, all she really ever does. Except, she doesn’t have any scavenged parts with her. She doesn’t even have her knapsack, or her speeder or her staff, or her goggles or tools or —

Rey bites her lip, and the spike of pain helps her get centered. She knows she has to get up and back to the AT-AT as soon as possible, preferably before anything spots her among the dunes and considers her to be a midnight snack. 

She stumbles to her feet. Her vision falters, fades, and Rey is terrified that she’s going to pass out again. Instead, it’s a memory that hits her — snow and blood, blue and red, red and blue, blurring together into a haze of purple — a man, dressed all in black, who looks at her like he’s known her forever. It’s a memory, a memory of a dream that she’s had over and over throughout the years, balm to the wound when she’s lying alone in her bed and the night stretches into an empty oblivion. 

Has she been dream-walking out in the desert? Chasing the comfort of a dream, of the feeling of belonging, subconsciously for so long that her feet joined in?

Goosebumps rise across her skin and Rey closes her eyes, focusing. The wind shifts, and stills, is smothered in silence. She hears the sand move around her feet. She hears her heartbeat pounding in her chest. And then another one, beating in time with hers, somewhere out among the stars. Nearby, and getting closer. 

A howl echoes in the distance. Rey opens her eyes, shakes her head. She doesn’t have time for such nonsense. Dreams are dangerous. Dreams make her want things. Dreams make her wonder about what it would be like to get off Jakku, to save up enough rations to buy a ride to a nearby planet with better resources and from there she could go anywhere in the whole galaxy — to the green island of her dreams, to the man with dark eyes...

Dreams remind her of things she can’t have. She’s already waiting for her parents; she can’t go looking for anything else. She has to stay on Jakku. That’s where they left her and that’s where they’ll come back to find her. Rey knows her parents will come. She just knows they will. 

She follows the footsteps, her footsteps, half-filled in with sand by the wind but visible nonetheless. They lead her back across the desert to her little home in the AT-AT. She trudges back inside, exhausted but strangely numb, looking at all the things she’s collected, the pitiful life that she’s carved out for herself. She pats the old rebel helmet as she shuffles by and collapses into her hammock. 

Rey gulps water from the full canteen sitting on the ledge. It is her supply for the week, but she doesn’t particularly care at this moment. She’s staring at the scratches on the wall, all the little groups of lines spanning the belly of the AT-AT. Rey reaches out as if to touch the marks, but tears cloud her vision and she sighs. How many more will it take? How many more scratches, how many more days, how much more waiting? 

She drops the canteen to the ground with a dull thud and watches it roll away. Rey curls into a ball on the hammock, hugging her knees to her chest like a child. She falls asleep. She doesn’t dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Reylo, but I’m more of a casual viewer when it comes to Star Wars as a whole. Therefore, some of the slang and lingo might be kind of whack. If you notice me using the wrong terminology or something, please let me know in a comment! I don’t have a beta reader, so all mistakes are my own.


	2. I: The Awakening

The air around Unkar Plutt’s trading stand is thick with sweat and smoke. It’s midmorning, the sun bright in the sky and burning down on the backs of the thieves, scavengers, and thugs lingering in Niima Outpost. Having collected her measly rations, Rey watches the others go about their business. 

There are both locals and spacers milling about, and she gazes after the newcomers with barely-concealed admiration. She knows they’re mostly criminals and smugglers, but their life of freedom fascinates her. And, of course, they probably aren’t all bad. Han Solo, for example. He’s a notorious smuggler, and he helped defeat the Galactic Empire. She’s heard all the stories, even being way out in this corner of the galaxy. Some say that most of it is myth, but Rey likes to believe. 

A commotion draws her attention. Rey lifts her goggles and clutches her staff to her side, gritting her teeth as one of Plutt’s henchmen tosses a small creature with blue horns to the ground. She recognizes him, the elderly hermit now hunched over in the sand, as a fellow scavenger. He’d been somewhat kind to her when she’d first gone out to the ship graveyard on her own. The others had descended like vultures to steal her findings that first day, but he’d waved them off to give her a running head start.  

Rey races to his side determined to return the favor in any way she can. She’s small, but wiry and fierce from surviving in such a harsh climate. The brawny thug raises his fist; Rey thrusts her staff at his temple. He staggers back, hand coming up to cradle the side of his head. His red eyes lock onto her. 

“Don’t go looking for trouble, desert rat.”

She glares. 

“Don’t go making trouble, then,” Rey says and swings her staff as the blue-horned creature rapidly crawls away into the gathering crowd. 

Plutt’s henchman catches it in his large hand and tugs; a move she’s not prepared for. She goes tumbling toward him and he grabs her around the middle. From far away, he’d looked fairly human. Up close, it’s clear to her how far from it he is. His forked tongue shoots out and licks her cheek, and before she has a chance to cringe or gag or really do anything at all, the beast tosses her.

Rey sails through the air and crashes into one of the only semi-permanent structures in the village — Plutt’s trading stand. Her head thumbs, hard, against the steel wall. She tastes blood in her mouth.

“Not so tough now, are ya?”

Anger fills her chest. She hears him approaching and scurries back up to stand on wobbly legs. Rey leans back on the wall, panting, lips pressed into a thin line. She’s tougher than this, she tells herself. She has the reputation to prove it; Rey hasn’t been beaten in a fight since she was old enough to be in one. But scrawny scavengers are one thing; Plutt’s goons are _huge_ , and now, unless she’s seeing things, there are three of them coming toward her.  The one with scales like a snake lifts his leg up and looks about ready to kick her hard enough to break all her ribs. She can’t spot her quarterstaff anywhere. There’s nothing around her to use as a weapon. Rey feels panic explode in her chest. She ducks her head and she raises her hand to soften the blow. 

But the kick never lands. 

Rey can suddenly feel a presence in her mind, not intruding or in her thoughts, but humming alongside her. It guides her to some unknowable place in her gut that has always been there, dormant. Niima Outpost disappears from around her, and for a fleeting moment, Rey sees the inside of a ship. There is a hulking figure in black reaching out to her; a creature in a mask. Energy sizzles through the air, power surges through Rey’s veins. Something in her is awake. 

Rey opens her eyes.

Plutt’s henchmen are on the ground several paces away, having been knocked out by some invisible force. There are stares. Whispers. Rey lets her hand fall back to her side. She is shaking.

Unkar Plutt himself is there in the front, gaping at her. He looks almost...afraid. 

Rey finds her staff, quickly, and then runs. Niima Outpost fades into the distance behind her. Her mind is racing, scrambling to understand what just happened, but she’s not sure. None of it makes sense. Maybe she’s gotten a concussion — did she imagine the way Plutt’s thugs crumbled to the sand? Did she imagine the surge of...something...leave her fingertips and save her? It’s too much to think about while she’s hungry. 

Back in the AT-AT, Rey stares at her empty bowl and has the irrational urge to cry. Because there’s no food; she checks her tunic and the knapsack over her shoulder, but she’s undeniably dropped the rations she spent so long earning when defending the blue-horned hermit. No food, and no water; the nightmare of a desert dweller.  Rey learned as a child that it’s a waste of water, so she pinches her arm to keep from crying. She swallows thickly, and sits in the dark corner with her homemade doll. 

She looks down at her hands. They’re rough, calluses covering each finger from long days of hard work. There are little flecks of white against her tan skin, a dozen scars peppered under the dirt and grime. Overall, they look like normal hands for a human girl of Jakku. Perfectly normal. Not capable, then, of pushing over anything without touching it.  No, Rey decides. In her disordered state, after hitting her head, she must have imagined the way things went down back at the trading village. She is a normal girl. She’s not special. She’s not somebody from a myth; she’s no one. Just Rey. Rey of Jakku. No last name, no family, nothing but some dreams and a few blurry memories to keep her warm at night and chase away the throb of loneliness. 

But before she can stop herself, she stretches out her right hand. Rey reaches for it, that feeling from before, that wave of peace and strength. For the masked figure. Suddenly, she wants it so bad she can barely breathe. In her mind, she extends her senses — out, out, out — and brushes up against something. Against someone. Rey gasps, the sound loud in the quiet of the AT-AT. She pulls away a little from the strange sensation, but the foreign consciousness follows. It follows her as she draws herself back over the sand dunes and the badlands and the ship graveyard, it follows her back to her home, and for one wild moment, Rey is scared to open her eyes for fear that it’ll be sitting in front of her with its hand similarly reaching out to her. 

She opens her eyes and closes her mind off from the stranger. A final rush of emotion overwhelms her before the dam shuts and Rey is left alone. She frowns. The stranger, whoever it is, seems desperate. Injured, maybe? Yes, he’s hurting. And he’s calling out to her. 

Rey leaps to her feet. For the second time that day, she runs to help. 

* * *

She finds him easily.

It’s like he’s a beacon, calling her across the desert. As she darts through the sand dunes, Rey tries to pull at his consciousness again. But unlike the hurricane that had hit her before, his mind and his emotions are muted. He’s fading. He’s dying. She can taste the blood in the back of her throat. She runs faster. 

Even though she can’t get into his thoughts, the thread leading her to him is still strong. Rey has the odd feeling like whatever is beginning to awaken in her is attuned to him somehow. Is he her family? Does she know him? Has someone, finally, at last, come for her? 

Rey stands, panting, in front of an Upsilon-class command shuttle. Or, what’s left of one. Most of it hadn’t survived the impact, it seems. Still, it looms over her, jagged pieces sticking out of the sand around the broken ship. There is a lot to scavenge here, she thinks, even with the rough landing that the shuttle had seemingly undergone. The outside looks bad, but Rey knows that there are probably some parts she can use. Maybe one day she can even fix the ship up. It’s a nice ship, after all, very expensive. And Rey is good at fixing broken things.

But that would all have to wait. Right now, she’s searching for the heartbeat she can feel thumping among the rubble as easily as she can feel her own drumming against her ribs. Rounding to the other side of the shuttle, boots crunching over glass, she finds a hole in the durasteel by the cockpit and climbs in.  It’s dark inside, and almost cold — much cooler than out in the sun at least. Rey shivers. Her staff is strapped to her back; she unties it and she brings it in front of her as she wades through the gloom. Shadows dance across the walls, pinpricks of light flicker down from the damaged ceiling and pierce the darkness. Rey turns the corner.

The cockpit is almost completely intact. It’s miraculous, really, considering the state of the rest of the ship. Almost as if, somehow, someone had cast a protective bubble around themselves. Still, the pilot and copilot chairs are overturned, and wires stick out of the control panel .  The durasteel wall to her left is bent as well like something had been thrown against it. Something big. Something currently in a black heap on the floor just beneath it.

Rey approaches carefully. Her breathing is ragged, impossibly noisy in her ear. Deafening. She stops a foot away from the heap and the thing shudders. She realizes that it’s not her own uneven breathing thundering in her ears, it’s coming from the masked creature. A spike of fear erupts in her stomach as she shifts and the dim light glints off the harsh contours of the mask. The shadows seem to cling to him, and the air around him tastes different, bitter and acidic. His emotions crash over her. Anger. Pain. Fear. Darkness. 

She has the urge to recoil but stamps it down. Maybe in another universe, she would have run from him, but in this one, she doesn’t. She stays. She kneels. She reaches for him. Because he feels familiar. Not that she’s ever met him before, exactly, but she recognizes him anyway, almost as if she saw him in a dream —

The man in the mask moans, gloved fingers clawing at his side. He turns his head, and Rey sees that the entire right side of the helmet is crumbling away. She can tell he’s unconscious, but he begins groaning, thrashing at the wound she suspects is under his black garments.  She puts her hand on his shoulder. He feels warm, even through all the clothing. At her touch, Rey’s surprised to find that he stops moving and chokes out a wet breath before becoming still once more. Even through the voice modifier in the helmet, she knows that sound isn’t good. If there’s blood in his lungs, then she’s not sure what she can do for him. 

However, the thought of him dying sends her into a panic. Rey’s not sure of much, especially not when it comes to this strange being in front of her, but she feels the newfound power buzzing in her veins react to him. She’d felt him, briefly, when she’d fought off Plutt’s thugs and again when she’d consciously reached out. Something in her is awake now. Not because of him, exactly, but he is a part of whatever’s happening to her. Rey can feel it. They’re the same.

She can’t leave him here. Not when, after all these years, someone’s finally dropped out of the sky and found her. 

Rey swallows around the dryness in her throat. Her hand shakes and she leans over the black heap, fingers grasping what’s left of the mask. She pulls it away from his face, as gently as she can, and lets it fall to the ground. She’d assumed by the sheer size of him that he was male, and she’s right. And human, which is a bit surprising but sends a bolt of hope through her heart. He looks a little too young to be a father or uncle, but brother? Could he be her older brother? Is that why she recognizes him? 

They don’t look very much alike, Rey thinks. They both have brown hair and light skin like most humans she’s seen, but his is much paler than hers and his hair is darker. A friend, maybe? Could they have been friends once upon a time in a childhood that she can’t remember? Rey likes that thought. She’s never had a friend before.

The whirlwind of her jumbled thoughts screeches to a halt when he lets out another horrible wet cough. His eyes flutter and he moans. Rey scoots closer, knees pressed against the bulk of his middle. He’s massive, she realizes, so much bigger than the few skinny humans she’s seen pass through Jakku. He’s well-fed, muscular; she can’t even feel his ribs as she puts her palms down on his chest. His garments are expensive too, probably worth more credits than she’ll ever see in her lifetime. Rey wonders where he came from, but quickly gets rid of the thought. She needs to focus. If she ever wants to get any answers, she has to save him. 

Bacta and medical droids are scarce in this part of the galaxy, but Rey knows she can’t get him to a healer in time anyway. She has to do something, and she has to do something now before he drowns in his own blood. Rey takes a deep breath, arranges her hands on his chest over where she thinks his lungs might be and opens herself up to the force inside her. 

Suddenly, she is filled with calm. The light fills her up, no longer dormant. Power radiates through her chest. It ricochets off her ribs, surges past her heart, and pushes its way along her arms to her palms. The shadows in the cockpit shrink away from her; she fills the shuttle in sunlight.  Rey feels the ache below her hands, the bruises and the cuts, a nasty gash on his head and the pierced organ in his chest struggling against the piece of durasteel embedded in it. She hadn’t even seen it earlier among all that black. And there’s something else too, something almost palpable, a dark cloud in his mind, pulling and warping and tangling his thoughts. Her nose dribbles with blood from the effort, but Rey shooes it away. 

Turning her attention back to his lung, Rey closes her eyes to feel the wound better. His cowl is in the way, so she pictures what she thinks it looks like in her mind. Without touching it, the metal scrap vanishes. Light flows from her to him. The lung fuses back together; the gash starts to close. His broken ribs begin to knit back together.

But before she can finish, a gloved hand closes around her wrist. Rey screams, jerked from her meditative trance, eyes wide. 

His voice is a deep rumble as he demands of her, “Who are you?”

His eyes are very, very dark. She feels a bit breathless all of a sudden. 

“I’m no one.”

A beat of silence, charged with an odd sort of tension that she doesn’t have a name for, and then she asks him, “Who are you?”

He’d been glaring at her, mouth twisted up into a snarl, but he blinks and the savage look abruptly melts from his face. He looks down at his hand, fingers still wrapped around her slim wrist, then back up at her. For a long minute, he stares in confusion. 

“I don’t know,” he says eventually.


	3. II: Nightmare

He can’t remember anything. Nothing about who he is, no memories of his past or of his family, no idea where he comes from. Rey watches him struggle with it, brow furrowed, lips pressed into a scowl. But all that results from it is a headache. He gets so frustrated that he punches the wall, dents the durasteel. He tugs off his glove, glaring at his bruised knuckles.

With a sigh, Rey takes his large hand into her smaller ones. He watches her as she tries to summon the light as she did before, but nothing happens. Rey frowns, more confused than ever.

They learn that his name is Kylo Ren from a comm device that has been crushed in the crash. It spits out the same garbled message over and over again before it completely dies.

“Ren,” he says, rolling the name around his mouth like it sounds slightly wrong.

There’s no communications grid in Jakku, but Rey sticks the device in her knapsack anyway.

“Yes,” she says, beaming up at him, “that’s your name, I guess. My name’s Rey. Hey! Our names kind of match—”

“How amusing,” he mutters, stalking past her. He does his best to look big and intimidating, but she notices the way he limps and the way he’s still breathing heavily.

“Slow down,” Rey calls, scurrying after him. “You’re still hurt and—”

“I’m perfectly capable of walking, thank you.”

Rey huffs and grabs his arm. “Stop interrupting me. I just saved your life, you ungrateful son of a Bantha!”

Kylo Ren snorts. “Saved my life? So that’s what you were doing when you were rifling through my robes. Not stealing, not looking for credits and valuables, no, the little scavenger was  _saving_ me. Now it all makes sense, thanks for clearing that up.”

Rey bares her teeth. “I could have left you for dead! I ran for over an hour to get here to help you. I wanted answers, but I guess that was a waste of time because you hit your head against the wall during the crash and you stopped me before I healed you, and now you can’t remember anything which means I don’t get any answers to any of my rapidly-multiplying questions and—” Rey takes a breath, then another, feeling dizzy and tired and hungry, wishing she was anywhere but here. Her stomach gives a loud growl and she hunches over, finger pressing against her abdomen.

When she looks back up at Kylo Ren, his eyes have lost all the rage that was building.

“Maybe there’s something to eat around here, something that survived the crash,” he says, voice gentle.

She nods. Hides her sniffle with a cough. “O-okay.”

They search the rest of the ship's carcass. There’s not a lot to look through, but Kylo leans against the wall half-way through, hand pressed to his side, panting. He tells her that he’s fine, and glares at her stubbornly, daring her to call him out on the lie. Rey rolls her eyes and goes back to scavenging.

The shuttle is pretty much demolished apart from the cockpit, and there isn’t any food or water, but she does find some good parts that’ll be enough to buy them both rations from Plutt. Rey puts them in her knapsack and turns to her companion. He’s watching her warily.

“The sun will be setting soon. I didn’t bring my speeder, so we better get walking. You can stay the night with me, and I’ll take you to Niima Outpost tomorrow. From there, I’m sure you’ll be able to hitch a ride somewhere.”

His first reaction about everything seems to be to fight. Rey sees it swell in him, sees him clench his jaw and gnash his teeth, but she blinks and the fire in him flickers out. Kylo sighs, running a hand through his hair.

“Alright.”

Before they go, he gives one last lingering look at the crumbled helmet on the floor. For a second, Rey thinks he might bring it with them. He doesn’t.

She leads the way across the desert. Even in the evening, the heat is suffocating. As they walk, Kylo sheds his outer garments. Rey tries to ignore the thrill that zips up her spine when he gets down to just his tunic and she can see the muscles in his arms move beneath the thin fabric.

Even without the layers, his clothes are still black and his trousers are leather. Sweat coats his forehead, pink blooms in his pale cheeks; she’s sure that he’s suffering, and that he’s not used to such a hot climate. However, he doesn’t complain. Maybe he’s used to being uncomfortable, being in pain. Rey bites her lip and looks away before he can notice her staring.

At the AT-AT, she halts, and Kylo almost runs into her back.

“This is it,” Rey says, moving toward the makeshift doorway in the belly of the walker.

He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything. He lets out a sigh of relief when he ducks into her little home and into the shade. It’s strange, Rey thinks, seeing him standing in her space. She’s so used to being alone. And now…

“Rey?”

She licks her lips. “Huh?”

“Can I sit down somewhere?”

She shakes her head to clear it. He’s still injured, she reminds herself, and decides to give him her bed. “My hammock’s over there.”

He smiles, just a little, but it makes her stomach lurch. “I don’t think I’m going to fit on that.”

Rey’s cheeks grew red. “Oh, uh, right. Well, there’s a chair over there and I can find you a something to sleep on…”

He sinks to the ground near her hammock and stretches out, using his bundled clothes as a pillow. “I think I’ll be fine like this. I’ve had worse.”

“You have no way of knowing that.”

Kylo considers this, looks like he’s about to argue, then clears his throat in admission. “Well, I suppose, not.”

She rolls her eyes. Her stomach rumbles, hunger spiking painfully through her gut, and all amusement fades. Rey grabs a dirty rag and goes to clean the parts she’s scavenged from his ship for something to do with her hands.

* * *

The sun sets, blazing along the horizon, and darkness descends on the desert. Kylo drifts in and out as she puts away her things. He mumbles something in his sleep, and she puts a blanket over him. It’s more for comfort than anything else; even though she feels a little chilly from the drop in temperature, she doubts he’s cold. She wishes she had something to feed him, or some water after the long trek over the dunes to get back to the AT-AT. He doesn’t really seem to mind, and Rey thinks back to what he said— _“I’ve had worse”_.

His pricey garments and ship tell another story, one of luxury and splendor. The way he holds himself to seem even taller than he is, dignified, almost regal. What is someone like him doing coming to Jakku? Is he a merchant? Then why the mask? Hiding behind a helmet certainly is suspicious, and indicates some sort of criminal. Maybe all his nice things are stolen? Can he be a thief? A smuggler? Rey perks up. Maybe he knows Han Solo.

Kylo Ren whimpers, rolling over in his sleep. She watches him, lines appearing on his forehead as his brow furrows. He looks miserable, caught in the midst of a nightmare. Waking him up might be merely shoving him into a different nightmare, so she leaves him be and goes to wash herself as best she can without water. Rey kicks her boots off, takes her belt from around her waist, and undoes her arm wrappings. Throwing a glance over to Kylo, she decides to leave everything else on and climbs onto her hammock.

Going to sleep with someone else nearby is unfamiliar to her. No matter the connection they seem to have, no matter how he helped her fight off Plutt’s goons, Kylo Ren is a stranger. And he is a man. She’s had men of all species try and follow her back to her shelter, try and force themselves on her before. After a jab with her quarterstaff to the eye and a kick to the groin, they always run off before they can do anything. But now there’s a man in her home. She invited him in, and now he’s lying only a few feet away from her, snoring softly.

The sun having sunk below the sand, her living area in the walker is now pitch-black. Rey is wide-awake, and hyper-aware of Kylo’s movements and the little noises he makes. His presence is pleasant, but she’s paranoid, and almost jumps out of her skin when she hears him yell. It’s Kylo; his voice is unmistakable. Heart racing, she slips to the ground and reaches for him. She can see the shape of him in the blackness and presses her fingertips to his shoulder. He takes a sharp gulp of air, and she realizes all at once that he’s crying. Rey brushes the wetness on his cheeks and Kylo shudders.

“He’s in my head. He-he won’t stop, _please_ , I just want it to stop hurting—I’m being torn apart—”

Torn apart? Was he dreaming about his ship crashing?

“No, no, you’re all in one piece,” she assures him, pressing her palm against his healed lung. “It’s okay—I fixed you, mostly. And tomorrow I’ll take you to Niima Outpost and we’ll find you a way back to your loved ones. It’ll be alright.”

She can tell he can’t really understand her; he’s not himself, ration and logic have completely exited the building—he’s all in a frenzy, stuck in some nightmare-world. Rey pushes him back down to the floor, and, dredging up a distant memory of her own, she curls herself around him and rubs his back. Had someone done this for her, once? She can’t really remember, but it feels like the right thing to do to calm him down, and it does; after a few minutes, Kylo relaxes and the tension leaves his muscles.

Growing bold now that she’s confident he’s gone back to the bliss of unconsciousness, Rey lifts her hand from his back to touch his hair. It’s soft, and almost as long as hers sans buns. Rey swallows, digging her fingers against his scalp. She’s careful to avoid the dried blood around the gash on the side of his head. She’d completely forgotten about it until now. Is this the injury that had cost him his memories? It hadn't seemed very serious earlier, but now it's difficult to tell how bad it is in the dark. Should she have wrapped it up, or something? She sighs. Rey knows practically nothing about medicine. She wishes that he hadn’t stopped her from healing when she’d been able to.

She accidentally brushes the nape of his neck, surprised at how heated it is. Had Kylo gotten a sunburn while following her to the AT-AT? His cheek had felt hot too, as she’d wiped his tears. When she hesitantly reaches over to feel his forehead. It's flaming, and Rey is filled with worry. Does he have a fever? Does that mean his wound is infected? She’d healed his lung, she knows that, but his flesh hadn’t fully knit itself back together in his ship before he’d woken. She knows he’d been limping, been in pain, but she thought she’d healed most of his injuries. Maybe Rey was wrong. Maybe he’s worse than she thought.

She drops that unhelpful train of thought. He’s probably just dehydrated, she thinks, and vows to bring him some water in the morning. She closes her eyes.

As she relaxes, she becomes aware of a sour presence grabbing at Kylo’s mind. Without really knowing what she’s doing, Rey pushes it away again like she'd done in his shuttle. Kylo Ren sighs, as if some great burden has been lifted from his chest. Rey curls her fingers in Kylo’s hair, pressing her forehead in the space between his shoulder blades. Sleep comes quickly.


	4. III: Blurred Lines

Kylo’s still asleep when she wakes up. They’ve changed positions in the night; instead of his back to her, he now lays flat on the unforgiving ground as she nestles under his arm. It isn’t a particularly inappropriate arrangement _—_ their legs aren’t tangled together or anything, the way his arm is thrown around her waist is casual. But for Rey, who hardly ever touches anyone, it is painfully intimate.

She touches his face and tells herself she’s just checking his fever. His forehead is warm, but nowhere near the way it scalded her last night. Good, Rey thinks. His wound probably isn’t infected. She’ll check later, but for now, she heaves herself to her feet in search of food and water.

She’s not so sure about venturing to Plutt’s trading house after what had happened the last time she was there. Rey decides to go to Reestkii, a settlement four hundred kilometers from Niima Outpost. It’s not much of a town, but there’s usually someone there willing to trade for parts. Using her speeder, she could get there and back by mid-day and avoid all the hassle Plutt is undeniably going to give her.

Rey is happy with her decision to stay away from Niima Outpost when she zooms past the village and catches sight of a group of soldiers in white uniforms. She’s never seen a stormtrooper before. They knock people over and hold up a holo-pad to the frightened scavengers. The sun bounces off their shiny helmets as they vanish into the distance.

A time later, Rey squints behind her goggles as Reestkii appears on the horizon. As she goes over a dune, the little town seems to rise out of the sand. Hunger claws at her stomach as she jumps from the speeder. Knapsack tied over her shoulder, Rey makes her way to the domed structure at the center of the settlement.

The dark-skinned inhabitants are reluctant to make a deal with a human girl, but the parts from Kylo’s shuttle are good and she knows it. They know it too. They’ll get a hefty sum from Plutt if they bother to go to him. Rey is almost mournful of how many rations she could have gotten from the junkboss, but something tells her it's better to avoid Niima Outpost for a while.

Canteen full, pockets heavy with veg-meat packs, Rey leaves Reestkii. It takes her two hours to get back to the AT-AT. Kylo is awake when she gets back, and her face colors as she remembers the position she’d woken up in, curled at his side. Rey waits until the blush fades from her cheeks before she takes off her goggles and unwraps the cloth around her lower face that prevents sand from flying in her mouth.

“You’re an early-riser,” he notes, watching her bang around her little kitchen area to prepare the food for them.

“Are you feeling better?” Rey asks, refusing to look him in the eye.

“No. It’s hot,” Kylo grumbles. “This is a terrible planet.”

“I think you have a fever. That’s why you feel hot,” she replies. Rey points at the canteen of water. “Drink.”

Surprisingly, he does as she commands and sits down on the rickety chair. She serves up the rations, sliding his bowl across the crate that serves as her table.

Kylo looks down at his meal in disbelief. “Is this what you eat?”

“Mm-hmm. Full of protein. Yum.”

He scowls down at it. “It looks awful.”

“How would you know? If you’ve ever tried veg-meat, you can’t remember. Unless... today all your memories are back?”

Rey’s hopeful and scared at the same time. If he gets his memory back, he can tell her why she felt him from all the way across the desert, why she’s so drawn to him, why he seems so familiar. He can tell her if he knows her. And she desperately wants someone to know her.

But if he gets his memory back, and he doesn’t recognize her, doesn’t know her, then he’ll certainly leave Jakku and she’ll probably never see him again. It was nice, Rey realizes, waking up to someone like she had that morning. She doesn’t want Kylo to leave, not yet. She doesn’t want to be alone.

She must have said that last part aloud because his gaze softens.

“You’re not alone.”

“Neither are you,” Rey tells him, and feels like something monumental has just happened.

* * *

 She tells him that she can’t take him to Niima Outpost until his fever’s gone. It’s an excuse, but part of her truly wants him to rest his injuries. Kylo lets her inspect his head wound, then the one in his abdomen. He offers to take his tunic off, and Rey stutters, says something unintelligible, and practically runs to another section of the AT-AT.

When the sun goes down, she finally musters up the courage to ask him about the previous night.

“Do you, uh, wanna talk about what happened? Your nightmare?” Rey asks. She’s settled in her hammock, resting her chin in her hand as she looks down at Kylo.

They’ve outfitted his corner with a mat and some fabrics bunched to serve as pillows. His outer garments hang over a pipe on the other side of the room. His knees are bent, hands resting on his stomach, as he twists to gaze at her. Kylo gives a little grunt of pain at aggravating the cut on his side, and sighs.

“What do you mean?”

Does he not remember? Is his memory getting worse, tossing out things that’ve happened since the crash? Or had he just been completely asleep while she’d held him as he’d cried?

“Um, there was _—_ well. I’m not sure what it was. But there was something, something bad, trying to get in your head. It was giving you nightmares, making you thrash around in your sleep. I think that’s the second time I chased the darkness away from you.”

Kylo just stares at her. His face is unreadable. “What,” he demands, “are you talking about?”

Rey looks away, picking at her nails, trying to find a way to explain without sounding completely insane.

“There’s this power, some type of force in you. There’s darkness around you...can’t you feel it? Light too, but it’s dimmer. I-I think I have it in me too.”

Kylo frowns. He’s confused, which makes him angry. “You don’t even know me,” he scoffs.

Rey sits up, indignant. She stares at him, long and hard. A dream surfaces in her mind _—_ _snow and blood, blue and red, red and blue, blurring together into a haze of purple — a man, dressed all in black, who looks at her like he’s known her forever._ She pushes it at him. His eyes go wide as it’s shoved into his head.

“Yes,” she whispers, “I do. Somehow.”

Kylo’s on his feet in an instant. His fingers grasp at his belt for something that’s not there. His chest is heaving, and the air crackles with energy.

“Witch,” he spits. His eyes are so dark they’re almost black.

The shelves rattle on the walls; the bowls crash to the floor and splinter. Rey’s old rebel helmet falls to the ground, along with her other tools and trinkets. She looks at Kylo, and fear clogs her throat.

“Kylo, stop! Calm down.”

“What have you done to me?!” he roars, and to her horror, he begins to beat on the wound at his side.

“Me?” she chokes out, standing up. “All of this started when you arrived! You unlocked something in me, merely by proximity, even before you crashed, and you have the nerve to _—_ ” Rey takes a deep breath to keep from hyperventilating. “You were calling for me!” she begins again, a bit more controlled. “I reached out, and you were already there, threading us together and pulling me across the desert! You’re the one in my dreams, you’re the one who's been haunting me. I think _you’ve_ done something to _me_.”

Her voice, pleading, needy, clinging, cracks on the last word. She’s not really sure why he’s so upset. She takes a step towards him; it’s the wrong thing to do. Something feral comes over Kylo’s face.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he snarls, and she has the distinct impression that he’s no longer talking to her.

“I know that,” Rey says. “I-I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with you! I’m saying we’re the same. Whatever’s going on, it’s happening to both of us.”

All the fight drains out of him; his emotions stop swirling, and the AT-AT walker stops shaking. Suddenly, Kylo looks down at his feet. He seems smaller, younger. Afraid.

“You’re sending me away? To Luke’s? But I don’t want to go _—_ ”

Rey frowns. “Who’s Luke?”

Kylo blinks, coming back to the present as he raises his gaze to meet hers. He swallows thickly. “I think I remembered something.”

* * *

After the fight, they don’t talk for the rest of the evening.

Rey curls up into a ball on her hammock, and Kylo sprawls out on the ground. There are a dozen questions on the tip of her tongue, but she doesn’t want to instigate him to explode again. She hugs herself around her middle and tries to ignore the pang of longing, the impulse to crawl to the floor and sleep with him like she’d down the previous night. Not _with_ him, she scolds herself, _next_ to him. Yes, there is a big difference.

“My mother,” Kylo says out of nowhere, and Rey looks around as if he is warning her that his parent has miraculously materialized in her home.

After so many hours of silence, she’s glad he’s talking, but she’s not sure how to respond.

“I remembered her,” he explains when she says nothing. “A conversation _—_ a long time ago, I think. The memory... it's painful.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Rey assures him gently, and she hears him sigh.

“What’s happening to me?” Kylo asks her, voice muffled. “Why did everything start shaking when I _—_ there was this voice in my head. It told me to hurt you.”

Rey lays very still, nails digging into the skin of her palms. She waits for him to continue.

“If it comes back, will you push it away again?” Kylo murmurs.

Her chest fills with warmth, whether from him or her she doesn’t know. She feels him opening up his mind to her, and it feels like coming home.

“Yes,” she whispers. “Of course I will.”

They both slip into a dreamless stupor, and the darkness seems very far away.


	5. IV: Sandstorm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just FYI, the rating has gone up.

The next day, Kylo convinces her that he’s well enough to accompany her on a scavenging expedition. She’s wary; his limp is gone, but she knows he has a strange relationship with pain and will push himself too hard if she doesn’t pay close attention. Still, she also knows that he’ll follow her anyway, so she decides to skip all the arguing and relents.  

They have breakfast together at her little crate-table. When a lull descends in their random chatter, Kylo asks about her buns and Rey gains a burst of bravery. She tells him about her family _ — _ or, rather, her lack of one. He nods like he understands. 

“I have the feeling like...like I don’t really have a family either. Not anymore,” Kylo tells her, scraping his teeth across the spoon in his mouth.

She gulps and grips her bowl. Rey hates the way her voice wobbles when she asks, “Do you think...that’s why you’re here? Do you think you could be my…”

He shakes his head with a sad smile. “I’m sorry. I think I’m an only child.”

She grits her teeth to keep from crying. “O-oh. Of course.”

Later, Kylo watches her gather her gear and put on her goggles. Rey glances over his dark clothing, knowing it’ll draw the heat, but she doesn’t have anything remotely his size to give him. She shrugs, strapping her staff to her back; he’d wanted to come, he’ll have to deal with it.

Outside the AT-AT, Rey hops on her speeder. It’s her pride and joy, fast and reliable, constructed entirely by her from scavenged parts. 

“Did you build this? All on your own?” Kylo asks.

She’d told him about her affinity for mechanical tinkering at breakfast. He’d seemed impressed at everything she’d built in the AT-AT, and the same expression comes over his face as he runs his eyes over the orange speeder. Rey nods, proudly. 

“Impressive. You’re a scrappy little thing.”

She whirls around, sure that he’s insulted her, but is surprised to find an amused smirk on his face. He’s teasing her. Has he done that before? If he had, had it made her stomach flutter? 

“Oh, are you joking? Is joking a thing that you do now?”

He shrugs one shoulder, and his smile grows as she huffs in irritation. He’s quite handsome, Rey realizes, when he’s not scowling down at her.

Before she can really wrap her mind around that thought, Kylo climbs onto the speeder behind her and puts his hands on either side of her waist. They’re large and warm, holding her gently. It’s not built for more than one person, but he keeps an appropriate distance between their bodies. Still, his hands are enough to make her dizzy. Rey tries to keep her breathing even, and mostly succeeds. 

“Are we waiting for something?” he wonders. His breath tickles her ear, and Rey curls her toes in her boots.

“No,” she squeaks, and off they go. 

Rey feels Kylo twisting back and forth to look out over the graveyard of ships, but there’s nothing to see. There never is. There’s just sand; never-ending and empty, interrupted only by ancient ships sticking up like decayed headstones. Rey thinks back to Kylo’s ship, scattered to pieces somewhere out there. She thinks about what would have happened had she not felt him, hadn’t got to him in time. She shivers, and Kylo tightens his hold on her waist. 

They ride for a long time. She picks a remote location where she’s certain they’ll be without the company of other scavengers and stops in front of a rebel X-wing Starfighter. Rey slides to the ground, and Kylo swings his long legs down to join her. He asks her the name of the ship, where it came from, who it belonged to. He asks her what parts she’s looking for. He throws questions at her and she answers them as best as she can, making a show of being annoyed at the inquiry, but secretly enjoying the way she can provide him with knowledge. She’d been so off-balance the last few days, feeling like he had come crashing into her life holding all the power and all the answers, but now they are even. He listens to her as she talks. He relies on her as they move through the different sections of the ship; he lets her help him when he starts limping again, even if he does frown the whole time. It feels nice. It feels like they’re friends. Equals.

Something has shifted since their big fight, Rey realizes. It scares her. He hadn’t come here for her, she tells herself firmly, even if it feels that way. He’s going to leave one day, she has to remember that. Everybody always leaves.

“What's that?” Kylo asks, pushing his hair back from his sweaty forehead.

She smiles a bit, tinged with melancholy but ready to respond to his question. Rey jolts when she realizes he’s not referring to something about the broken X-wing. Kylo’s eyes are hooked on something over her shoulder. She turns, hair spilling out of her buns and falling in her eyes from the increase in wind. 

“Sandstorm,” she murmurs. 

Adrenaline spikes through her veins. Without meaning to, she’s pressing herself into Kylo’s mind and she realizes abruptly that he has no idea what she’s talking about. Rey doesn’t have time to explain. She just runs, feet pounding through the sand to get back to the speeder, and hopes Kylo gets the hint. 

He does, and with his long strides, he beats her back to the speeder, helping hoist her up into the seat before settling behind her. Her back is flush against the hard plane of his chest; there’s no distance between them now, no time for such thought of personal space when danger approaches on the horizon.

Rey directs the speeder toward the AT-AT. It takes her several minutes before she admits to herself that there’s no way they’re going to get back to her home before the storm reaches them. 

“There!” Kylo shouts over the wind, pointing to a ravine that appears from behind a sand dune. 

“That’s not enough of a shelter,” she calls.

He scoffs in her ear. “It’s better than being out in the open.”

For lack of a better option, she agrees, and the speeder hurtles them closer and closer to Kelvin Ravine. Somehow, with energy buzzing around them, they make it down into the canyon and halt the speeder under an overhang. Rey tugs Kylo into the small cave just as the storm hits and the air erupts with sand and dust. They press to the back of the jagged rocks, coughing and watching as the sky is eclipsed with beige participles. 

“I hate the desert,” Kylo mutters, glowering toward the swirling sandstorm outside. 

His hair is wild from the wind, sticking up in all different directions, and Rey has to smother the urge to laugh. Her own hair has fallen out of two buns; only the one on the top of her head remains to keep the brown mane out of her face. 

“Better get comfortable,” she says, sliding to the ground and crossing her legs. “We might be here awhile.”

He huffs but follows her example. They sit in silence for a few minutes, him fidgeting the whole time and tapping long fingers against his knee impatiently. Rey watches him out of the corner of her eye, notes the tension in his broad shoulders and the way his jaw strains against his pale skin. She can feel emotion boiling in him, but this thread between them is so new and she’s not sure how to properly read his feelings without bulldozing into his head _ — _ something that she’s sure would break the fragile trust they’re building.  

Kylo sighs, feeling the weight of her stare.  “I’m not fond of being trapped,” he replies. His voice is cold, detached, but she knows this isn’t directed at her.

“Do you...remember something?”

He frowns, concentrating. “Not really. Just there’s this _ — _ being cornered, being trapped, it sets off alarm bells. And I have this compulsion to never sit with my back to the door, to always have an exit route planned out, to have a weapon ready…”

Kylo’s fingers brush his belt like he’s looking for something. There’s a loop there on his right side like something is usually sheathed against the leather. “I think I’m a soldier,” he says, like the idea has just dawned on him. 

It’s possible, she thinks. He has quick reflexes, she remembers, had shown good instincts when they were moving about the rumble of the X-wing. Had his nightmares been memories of the battlefield plaguing him?

“Why would a soldier come to Jakku?” Rey wonders aloud. 

She’s heard of the Resistance and the First Order, but from somewhere so distant and remote as Jakku, the war seems almost like a fairytale. What reason would someone have to come all the way here?

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’re a private guard, protecting some senator or princess or _ — _ ”

“Must be a tough job,” he replies. “I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

She turns in the dirt to face him, blinking rapidly. “Really? 

Kylo nods, fists his hands in the fabric of his shirt, and before she understands what he’s doing he has tugged the tunic over his head. He sits bare-chested before her and Rey forgets how to breathe. All at once, her eyes take in the constellation of moles, the muscle in his biceps, and the trail of dark hair vanishing into his trousers. 

She’s distracted from admiring him when she notices the scars he’d mentioned, standing out against his pale skin as angry marks all over his chest. A few of them, like the healing wound on his side by his navel, are red and were gained from the crash, but most of them are old, faded, having been inflicted years ago. There’s one, cauterized like a burn and white with age, starting at the delicate hollow of Kylo’s throat that slices across to his armpit, like someone had tried to take his right arm off. Or, like they’d been trying to decapitate him, and he’d moved just in time. 

Kylo clears his throat self-consciously, eyes not meeting hers. Instead, he’s watching a bug crawl through the sand by his boot. He shrinks away from her gaze, a bit, probably without even meaning to. He’s embarrassed, Rey realizes, and lifts herself up on her knees so that their eyes are level.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I have some too.”

And she shows him her hands, then unwraps the bindings of her arms to show him the mark on her upper arm from when she fell through a grate, years ago, while scavenging in a broken Imperial ship. He traces the scar with his eyes and looks at her questioningly.  She nods and stays very still as he scoots closer and moves to touch her arm. Softly, his thumb skims the ridged pink line, over and over. His skin is warm. She breathes in sharply and his nostrils flare. Kylo’s fingers suddenly go past the scar to dart between freckles, trailing over the cloth wrapping covering her shoulder to investigate her collarbone. 

He’s barely touching her; she could easily pull away if she wanted to _... _ but Rey doesn’t. She remembers how nice it was to bury her fingers in his hair, and so she does, figuring it’s only fair considering the way he’s exploring her. His gaze snaps to her face. Kylo’s breathing heavily, hot puffs of air that she can feel on her cheeks _ — _ that’s how close they are. And he’s looking at her like he does in her dreams, like he's known her all her life. The way she’s always yearned to be looked at. 

His hand moves down her chest, and then he’s under her wrapping and her thin tunic, cupping her breast. She arches forward at the new sensation, biting back the yelp that rises in her throat when Kylo’s calloused finger brushes over her nipple. 

“Kriff, you’re so beautiful,” she thinks she hears him whisper, but blood is roaring in her ears and the wind is raging just outside the cave so Rey can’t really be sure. 

She wants to move closer, but the position won’t allow it; their knees are already locked together. Rey makes an annoyed noise, decides to take matters into her own hands by wiggling onto his lap. Kylo chuckles. She whimpers when he retracts his hand from under her garments, but he touches their foreheads together and Rey relaxes again. There are gold flecks in his eyes, she notes, head spinning.

He presses his hand against her trousers at the junction of her thighs and she chokes. She’s wet there, arousal sparking through her veins. Rey closes her eyes, feels him begin to move his fingers hesitantly over the fabric, then under it, undoing the button and slipping his large hand to where she’s aching for him. She can feel him, thick against her ass as she squirms in his lap; Kylo rubs at her clit and she puts her arms around his neck. She opens her eyes and has to bit her lip to keep from crying out as her orgasm hits her. 

Kylo grunts and something swells between them, light gathering and expanding from their forms. It radiates from their joined bodies, and Rey isn’t sure where Kylo ends and she begins. His mind opens to her and she brings down her walls to allow him the same. They float like this for an undefinable amount of time, the Force washing through them, filling their pores and rushing through their veins. Neither of them has a name for what’s happened, but Rey’s never felt more alive. She’s in touch with the world around her, the bugs in the sand, the water dripping from the rocks, the sand itself shifting in the storm. She’s honed into Kylo too, can feel every breath he takes, every beat of his heart like it’s her own. She feels his strength and his pain, the dark and the light glimmering in him. If she focuses, she can pull at his thoughts, but she doesn’t intrude on his privacy. They float together. They exist. They melt into the Force.

The sandstorm has finished by the time they return from their meditative trance. Rey climbs off of him, and Kylo helps her to her feet, pulling his shirt back on. She begins to feel embarrassed about what happened as she rebuttons her trousers, but he shoots her the brightest smile she’s ever seen and can’t bring herself to feel regret for getting so intimate with him.

They walk out of the cave hand-in-hand.


	6. V: The Attack

Her speeder is gone.

Rey frowns at the spot where they’d left it under a nearby overhang next to the cave, figuring that the wind must have carried it elsewhere. Kylo helps her search, and they move through the ravine in pursuit of her prized possession.

She doesn’t have her staff either, it being still strapped to the side of the speeder, and it makes Rey feel vulnerable without a weapon to protect herself. Every once in awhile, Rey glances up the cliffside to the edge of the ravine. Although she expects something to be staring down at them, watching, hunting, there’s never anything there. But she feels eyes on her, lifeforms surrounding them just within the range of her awareness. Kylo knows something’s off too; she feels it in the spark of anxiety that shoots across their bond, sees it in the way he stays close to her side.

The ravine widens around them as they continue walking. A village appears in the distance.

“Kylo _—”_

“I see it,” he says, eyes squinting against the sun’s harsh rays.

She’s never been to Kelvin Ravine before, has no knowledge of a settlement within. Are these friendly desert dwellers? Rey knows from experience that they hardly ever are. Jakku is not a place to grow crops and raise a family. It is not the place for normal, friendly interactions. The inhabitants are hungry, hostile, desperate; outlaws taking advantage of the lack of communication grid, poor spacers in-debt looking for a good deal off-the-books, or people dropped here in exile against their will. Everyone would leave the barren planet if they could. Nobody comes to Jakku by choice.

Rey’s stopped moving, reluctant to invade on unfamiliar territory. Kylo notices her absence at his side after several paces and turns around.

“They probably have your speeder,” he says, gesturing for her to follow.

But she stays still, flexing her fingers.

“I don’t think _—_ ”

Kylo arches an eyebrow. “Who else would have it?”

“I don’t think we should just rush into something that may turn into a bad situation very quickly! You don’t know Jakku like I do. People here are _awful_.”

“You’re not.”

She blushes, throat suddenly dry. Rey swallows. “S-still.”

He grabs her hand, and the feel of his skin sliding against hers is electrifying. “Come on,” Kylo tugs on her arm gently, and Rey lets him persuade her to continue walking.

She glances back at the narrow passage splitting the desert in two, the fierce ridges and slopes of the ravine, remembering the way she’d felt as though something was following them. Rey is sure that she sees something unnatural among the sand, a glint of white against pale blue sky. But she blinks, and the mirage is gone. Kylo squeezes her hand, having sensed her worry but unaware of the cause of it. Rey inches closer to him, keeping her gaze straight ahead.

The settlement in the mouth of the ravine seems to be deserted upon the first inspection. As they near the little huts all in a circle, Rey fears they’ve encountered an abandoned village and that her speeder is lost forever. She lets go of her companion’s hand to look around, skidding to a halt once more as the doors to the huts open and reveal the inhabitants of Tuanul.

An old man with a clipped grey beard, whom they later learn is named Lor San Tekka, approaches the young pair with open arms. “Welcome! We felt your presence, your power, during the sandstorm. We’ve been expecting you, Force users.”

Rey and Kylo exchange a confused, uncomfortable look.

Kylo clears his throat. “Uh, what’s the Force?”

* * *

 There are stories about what happened. Rey’s heard them all, in passing, many times before. Tales of how the galaxy was saved only thirty years ago by a young trio _—_ the beloved Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker. Tales of the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. The infamous Dark Vader. The Sith and the Dark side. The Jedi and the Light side. The Force. It’s like something from a fairytale; Rey’s always longed, always hoped to know more. She never expected the stories to be all true. Most of all, Rey never expected to be a part of the story.

She listens to Lor San Tekka and the other members of the Church of the Force with childlike fascination, her eyes wide with wonder. Kylo is restless beside her. His eyes flash with recognition, but he remains silent, fidgeting with the hem of his tunic. He’d been presented with new clothes, brown instead of his usual black; lighter and thinner garments that are better suited for the heat. They don’t fit exactly right, being from a smaller man of the Church, but Kylo wears them well.

Still, he seems uneasy, though she has a hunch that it’s not the new outfit. Being surrounded by strangers doesn’t exactly supply her with fuzzy feelings either, but Kylo is severely on-edge. At the mention of Dark Vader, he flinches. His eyes dart to the door of the hut like he wants to bolt. His long pale fingers curl into fists in his lap. When she puts a hand on his arm, he grinds his teeth and refuses to look at her.

Lor San Tekka is explaining the relationship his village has with the Force, how they worship and respect the religion, how they believe it can bring balance to the galaxy. Though themselves not very force-sensitive, he tells them how the members of the Church felt Rey and Kylo call the Force as they’d slipped into a powerful meditation back in the cave. Rey is trying to listen, trying to wrap her head around her sudden involvement in something so much bigger than herself, but Kylo is raging through their bond.

Rey puts her hand on his arm and Kylo recoils. His emotions flit by her so fast that she can’t identify them. She can feel him drawing energy, drawing the Force.

Lor San Tekka stops talking. The inhabitants of Tuanul shift nervously.

“Kylo…?”

He opens his mouth, then snaps it shut again. He’s looking at the door to the hut; his eyes narrowing. “Something’s coming.”

Rey feels it then; focusing on the Force brings her awareness of all life around them and she feels the approach of humanoid lifeforms. She can feel them hovering outside the village. She’d felt them in the ravine too, and something tells her they aren’t friendly. In the next second, the distinct and spine-chilling sound of blasters being fired fills the air and confirms her fears.

Rey and Kylo leap to their feet.

“Everyone get down! Stay inside,” Rey commands the Church members before following Kylo as he sprints outside of the hut.

A dozen stormtroopers fill the village, pristine white suits glowing under the afternoon sun. The previous shots had been a warning, a call to attention, but they adjust their weapons, aiming to kill. They focus on Kylo, assessing him to be the bigger threat. It’s a mistake on their part.

“We’re looking for K _—_ ,”

Rey doesn’t let the stormtrooper finish his sentence before she holds out her hand and sends a blast of wind to knock him to the other end of the Tuanul settlement. From then on, the battle is a blur. Rey’s new to the Force, but strong, and uses her abilities as best as she can with no training. Still, her fighting is messy, being used to hand-to-hand combat with her staff.

Kylo starts out as sloppily as her, but as the fight progresses he becomes increasing better at fending off their attackers. A blaster goes off, heading straight for his chest, but he stops the red beam in mid-air merely by raising his hand. With a flick of his wrist, he sends it hurtling back toward the soldiers who have to dive to avoid being struck down. His right hand twitches, reaching for something on his belt that isn’t there.

Distracted by how well he’s fairing, Rey doesn’t realize the weapon pressed to the back of her head until it’s too late. Heart pounding, she squeezes her eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable.

Instead of blasting her skull open, the stormtrooper drops the blaster and snatches her arms, spinning her around. She looks at his helmet, stares at the black sections where his eyes are hidden.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” he whispers.

Rey nods. “Me either.”

They stare at each other for a long time, the sounds of violence still audible in the background as Kylo duals the remaining eleven soldiers. Rey feels like the stormtrooper in front of her is fighting a battle of his own, internally. She knows immediately when he’s made up his mind; he takes off his helmet. He’s dark-skinned, handsome, only a bit older than her. He gives her a hesitant smile.

“Your orange speeder is back in the narrower part of the ravine. If we can get there _—_ ”

“We can’t leave the residents of Tuanul to fend for themselves. They’re peaceful, devoted to spirituality and religion.”

“My troop has no business with these people,” the man promises. “Our mission is merely looking for someone, and it’s clear he’s not in this village. Two new force-users...yeah, the First Order would be very interested in that. They’ll follow us instead of stay here. We can draw them away!”

Rey nods, face set with determination. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“Do you have to tell your boyfrie _—_?”

Rey shoves the message to Kylo in her head. From across the battlefield, he whirls around to face her, dark hair slick with sweat. His chest is heaving. His eyes are wild. For a moment, they’re lost in each other's gaze. His tongue darts out of his mouth to lick at the blood on his lip and she’s spell-bound.

Reality comes crashing in soon enough; the stormtroopers resume their attack on him and the one at Rey’s side clears his throat. Kylo picks up a fallen blaster, and, eyes still locked on her, starts charging across the village. Rey scrambles for the weapon her new friend had dropped, covering Kylo’s retreat as the white-suited soldiers start shooting at them.

As a trio, still firing shots over their shoulders, Kylo, Rey and FN-2187 race through the sand and into the ravine. Directing them to the hidden speeder, the stormtrooper tells them his identification number.

“But what’s your name?” Rey asks.

“FN _—_ ”

“Does it matter?” Kylo grumbles, glancing behind them.

“Of course it matters, I _—_ ”

“Finn,” Kylo huffs in exasperation. “Let’s just call him Finn. Now can we go?”

He gestures to the seat and Rey hops on. Somehow, they’re able to all squeeze on with minimal awkwardness. Rey hears footsteps getting closer and she takes control of the speeder, speeding off and out of the ravine.

She makes sure that the stormtroopers follow them for awhile and are away from Tuanul before weaving through the ship graveyard, losing the First Order soldiers among the rubble. Rey spots the AT-AT up ahead and sighs, feeling the adrenaline leave her system. Kylo settles a hand at the small of her back, and she feels the imprint of it on her skin long after they’ve unmounted.

“Thank you for saving our lives,” Rey says to Finn, once they’re all inside her home.

She and Finn are sitting around her crate-table. Kylo leans against the wall, arms crossed over his broad chest, brows furrowed as he glares at the floor.

“No problem. To be fair, you guys seemed to be doing pretty well on your own. And you,” Finn turns to Kylo, chuckling nervously, “looked like you were gonna rip somebody’s head off. Figured I should do something, make up my mind, before blood was shed on either side.”

Rey sips from the canteen of water in her hands. “And what have you decided?” she wonders.

“Not to kill for them. They’ve taken everything from me, my home, my parents _—_ but they can’t take my humanity,” Finn proclaims proudly, beaming at her sweetly.

“Takes a lot of guts to rebel against something you’ve always known,” Kylo mutters.

Rey frowns at him, but he won’t look at her. During the battle, after they had communicated through the bond, Kylo had completely shut her out of his head. She had felt darkness gather as he fought, and was worried at the way it seems to still cling to him in the aftermath. As Finn keeps talking, something about her “cool house”, Rey tries to brush up against Kylo’s consciousness but he keeps his inner walls firm.

“—reminds me of the time that I...uh, hey guys? Can you not do that silent-stare thing? It’s totally weird.”

“Sorry,” Rey says at the same time as Kylo declares, “I have to go.”

“Go?” she stands up quickly, toppling her homemade chair. She tucks her hair behind her ears self-consciously, realizing it’s probably a mess from being out of her signature buns. “Go where?”

“Just for a walk. Eat dinner with Finn. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

He’s already standing in the doorway, the last rays of sunset illuminating the edges of his hair like a glowing halo. In his new desert garb, blaster in his belt, he looks like something from a legend. He looks like a hero. 

Rey moves to stand with him, pressing her palm to the middle of his chest. She can feel his heartbeat. She stares up at him, and his eyes—there’s something different about them. Something that hasn’t been there before. Something—

As she studies him, Kylo’s gaze softens. “I’ll be back, sweetheart. I promise.”

She goes up on her tiptoes and kisses him.

He freezes against her, and Rey’s horrified that she’s made a huge error until, at last, the shock melts away and Kylo kisses her back like he’s a man starved. His tongue enters her mouth; he wraps his large hand around her waist. He devours her. Desire flares in her stomach. Rey moans, dizzy and delirious as she buries her fingers in his hair, pushing her body flush up against his.

Remembering Finn is in the room, Rey reluctantly separates their mouths. Kylo watches her hungrily and she smoothes down her rumpled clothing, blushing slightly.

“Be back soon, okay?”

He leans in and Rey holds her breath for another kiss, only a tinge disappointed when he plants one on her forehead and takes a step back. “I will," he says.

To fill the awkward silence, Finn starts talking about something or the other, and Rey, pushing down the sudden urge to cry, watches Kylo vanish into the distance. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the lovely reviews!


	7. VI: The Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bring on the angst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in one day? i need to settle down

It’s been two hours and Rey’s starting to get nervous. The sun has set, cooling the desert, blue sky covered by a dark blanket of stars. She and Finn have gobbled down dinner long ago, and now he lounges in her hammock while she tinkers for something to occupy her idle hands. If her new friend notices the way she keeps glancing at the entrance to the AT-AT, he is kind enough not to comment on it.

“What is that?” he says, and Rey looks up from the gadget in her hand.

“Huh? Oh—it’s a broken comm device.”

“Cool! You can repair machines like that?”

Rey grins at Finn. “I can fix anything,” she proclaims proudly.

The AT-AT creaks with the wind and Rey sits up straight, gaze flickering to the door. When she looks back at Finn, he’s giving her a sympathetic smile.

“So,” he starts, knowingly, “he’s your boyfriend, right?”

Rey has no idea. They’ve never really talked about the spark between them—after all, she’s only known Kylo a few days. She doesn’t know where they stand, doesn’t honestly know if he sees her as anything other than the girl who saved his life. She’s never been a part of a romantic relationship before, doesn’t know how it works, how fast you are supposed to move. It’s all so confusing. Intoxicating.

_“You’re so beautiful.”_

_“I’ll be back, sweetheart.”_

And that kiss...Rey shudders. She sighs, realizing she hasn’t given Finn an answer.

“Well,” she says, “he’s my...my—mine.”

Finn nods, and that’s that. Until, of course, the comm device comes to life in her hands. The screen lights up and it emits that same garbled message she’d heard in Kylo’s shuttle. Just like the last time, she can hear his name among the static, and not much else. To her surprise, Finn lets out a yelp and jumps to his feet.

“D-did that thing say Kylo Ren?”

Her brows knit together in confusion. “Um, yeah?”

“That’s his device!? Do you have any idea who—”

Rey frowns. “Yes. He’ll be back any minute.”

Finn’s eyes go comically wide with panic. His mouth hangs open. He looks to the door of the AT-AT, then back at her. “Oh, Kriff.”

* * *

Kylo doesn’t come back.

Rey is frozen as she listens to Finn’s hasty explanation of who Kylo Ren is, the fearsome Knight of Ren, the apprentice of Snoke. A man in a mask intent on ruling the galaxy with an iron fist. Finn makes him sound like a monster, and Rey doesn’t know what to believe. She’d felt it, the dark in him. She’d felt it, and she’d thought she’d be able to...what? Fix him? Kylo isn’t an old speeder or a broken comm device. He’s a person. He’s—

Kylo doesn’t come back but the stormtroopers do. Finn gives her a look as they race out her home in the walker, and it doesn’t take a lot to realize who sent them.

Tears burn her eyes. Rey bites her lip until she draws blood. She is such a fool.

* * *

 They escape from Jakku on the Millenium Falcon, leaving Niima Outpost, an enraged Unkar Plutt, and eleven furious stormtroopers behind. In Plutt’s junk yard, the ship had looked like a piece of garbage, but it flies like nothing else in the galaxy. It had made the Kessel Run in less than fourteen parsecs. No—twelve parsecs, Han Solo tells them when he finds Rey and Finn crouched in a compartment under a floor panel.

Finn’s so relieved that it’s not the First Order onboard the ship with them that he lets out a cry of delight at the sight of the famed figures of Han and Chewbacca. Rey is silent. She stares and stares. Han Solo is different than she thought he would be but no less charming and handsome despite his age. And there’s something, Rey notices, about the shape of his face, his smile, that seems familiar. He tells her and Finn about Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy, about the apprentice that turned to the dark side, about his son, and Rey thinks she knows why. She digs her fingernails into the skin of her palms, creating red crescent-moons in the soft skin, and tries to take deep breaths to remain calm.

She copilots the Falcon as Han decides to take them to see Luke and Leia. Finn tells the older man that she is force-sensitive, boasting about it like it’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen, and Han looks at her with sad eyes.

“You’re taking me to Luke Skywalker?” she asks.

A memory surfaces in her mind, Kylo’s voice cracking with emotion _— "_ _You’re sending me away? To Luke’s? But I don’t want to go"_ _—_

“Yes,” Han sighs. “He’ll know what to do.”

Rey’s not so sure. But, truly, she has nowhere else to go.

* * *

 They land on Hoth. An old rebel base is being rebuilt for the Resistance, commanded by General Organa.

“No need for titles. Please, call me Leia,” the general insists, and Rey has the swift urge to hug the woman. She’s beautiful in a way that seems almost otherworldly, and her eyes _—_ they’re Kylo’s eyes.

Han and Leia show her around the base, but for Rey, it is a blur. Everything’s happening so fast, legends turning to flesh and blood right in front of her eyes, the impossible becoming reality. And Hoth is cold _—_ horribly, horribly cold; snow and ice and arctic wind on the back of her neck. She feels sluggish, chilled to the bone. Someone puts a blanket over her shoulders, Finn’s hand is warm on her arm, but Rey is numb.

She meets Luke Skywalker. She can’t look him in the eye.

* * *

 The next day, they give her a room in an empty corridor used for storage. Rey is glad. She doesn’t want to have to talk to anyone. Not even Finn, who has quickly become something like a brother to her.

“Are you going to be okay here alone while I get debriefed?”

 _Alone_. The word is like a knife-wound to her gut.

She clears her throat, hugging the blanket around herself like a child seeking comfort. “D-debriefed?”

Finn’s mouth curves up into a dazzling smile. “Yeah! I’m going to tell them what I know about the First Order...which isn’t much, finding Kylo Ren was my first mission _—_ before, I was on sanitary duty and, well, you don’t need to know about that. But _—_ ”

“Finn,” she whispers, and he stops, nods, understands without a word. Rey is so, so grateful to have met him.

“Call me if you need anything,” he says, eyes lingering on her face before he lets the door shut between them.

Rey moves past the boxes stacked on the ground and sits on the bed. Dust explodes into the air, and she closes her eyes. She lays back among the shadows. It’s a bit warmer in her room than out in the open hanger, but not by much. Not to a sand scavenger. Rey wants to be warm, she wants…

She slips her hand down over her chest, shuddering as she pinches her nipple. Then lower, over her belly to the button on her trousers. She pops it open, lets her hand venture inside. She’s done this before, late at night in the darkness of the AT-AT, clumsily fumbling around with inexperienced hands. With Kylo it had been different though. Better. She misses him, and it hurts everywhere.

She circles her clit and shoves two fingers into her cunt, moaning, hips lifting off the bed. Rey feels the ghost of a hand on her thigh, larger than hers, paler, long fingers mingling in the wetness of her center. She chokes, gasps, clenches around her own fingers and pretends they're Kylo’s. She comes with his name tumbling from her lips.

Rey feels him then, reaching for her through their bond, and it cuts through the haze of her orgasm, the haze of the last twenty-four hours. She shuts him out of her mind quickly, but she’s pretty sure he knows what she’d doing. And who she’d been picturing between her legs. But before she can muster up some embarrassment, a chill goes down her spine. He’s close, Rey realizes, extending her senses out along the frigid planes of Hoth. She can feel him out there in the cold, waiting for her.

It hits her hard. She’d known, somehow, that they would see each other again. But so soon? It seems especially cruel. Something that a monster would do. Finn had warned her as such, hadn’t he? He’d voiced all the things she’d already known, all the things she’d been afraid of. All the things she’d ignored in the vain attempt to not be alone. And Kylo had left her, so none of it really matters anyway. She’s made this mess, and now, Rey knows, she has to face the consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can't already tell, Luke never went into hiding in this AU.


	8. VII: Home

The hallway is eerily silent as Rey slips out and slides her door shut. There are voices, bursts of noise from the command room as the Resistance plans their next move, but it all seems so far away, so distant. They’re only on the other side of the base, but the others might as well be on the other side of the galaxy for how alone Rey feels. Alone. It’s a word filled with bitterness, with poison, a heavy ache that spreads outwards from her chest and into her limbs. Alone. It’s as familiar and painful as a sunburn, as the hunger in her belly, as the feeling of loving someone and watching them walk away.

_“You’re not alone.”_ _—_ Kylo’s voice in her head. She freezes, horrified that he’s managed to get past her inner walls, but it’s merely her own memory echoing in her mind.

Rey swallows, stumbles forward, plunging head-first into a Force vision. She knows it’s a vision because suddenly she’s back on Jakku, back in the sand, screaming and crying and begging for her parents to come back, to just turn around and look at her one last time. But they don’t. And then a voice, a voice Rey’s never heard before _—"_ _Whoever you’re waiting for on Jakku, they’re not coming back. But someone else will”_.

Rey spins around and suddenly she’s standing beside a gangly teenage boy with big ears and short, dark hair. They’re on a rainy planet that she doesn’t recognize, watching as a ship prepares to depart. The boy’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, eyes blinking rapidly; he’s trying not to cry, she realizes. Luke says something, pats him on the shoulder, but Ben Solo doesn’t look away as his father boards the Falcon. Han turns, gives a half-smile, a wave—“ _I’ll see you soon, kid.”_ —an empty promise that stings no matter how many times Ben’s heard it. Luke goes inside one of the huts to get out of the rain, but Ben stays put, standing still as a statue in his drenched robes until the lights of his father’s ship fade into the distance. He clenches his fists, lets the raindrops mingle with the tears falling down his cheeks, and Rey feels the flare of darkness around them, and she understands—

She falls backward into the hallway of the Hoth base. Everything is as it was, except for the lump by her feet. In the dim light, she bends down and picks up the hilt. She presses the button and the lightsaber hums to life, a blue beam shooting out to penetrate the shadows. And she remembers the old dream, the memory, the vision—snow and blood, blue and red, red and blue, blurring together into a haze of purple—a man, dressed all in black, who looks at her like he’s known her forever.

Rey puts the lightsaber in her belt. She knows what she has to do.

* * *

 Before leaving the base, she runs into Leia, who gives her garments fit for Hoth’s frigid climate. The exchange is quick, and Rey lies about where she’s going—“Just for a short walk. I need some air.”—while trying to hide the item at her belt. Leia gives her a knowing look, gives her a firm hug.

“Please,” Leia whispers, “please, if you can...bring him home.”

Rey nods against her shoulder, staying in the comforting embrace a moment or two longer than necessary.

But even with her borrowed outfit, the cold is unbearable. Her nose and the tips of her ears grow numb as she drags her boots through the snow, puffing and panting, wandering to her final destination. Snowflakes coat her eyelashes and blur her vision, turning the heaps of ice and shadowy trees up ahead into a smear of wintery colors. She doesn’t use her gloved hand to wipe her face clean; she knows without seeing where to go.

She can feel him waiting for her, practically vibrating with anger and confusion and bloodthirst, but still, it’s a violent shock when he emerges from the snow and the trees, wearing his helmet and full black outfit like a suit of armor. Every inch of his skin is covered, hidden, behind the menacing garb. And in his hand, the beam of red light from his saber casts him in a hellish glow. Gone is the man she’s come to know, the boy she’d seen in her vision; now, he stands before her like something from a nightmare. A villain. A creature in a mask. Kylo Ren.

Rey expects him to attack her immediately, but he does nothing but stare. She can’t see his eyes but she can feel them, and it sends a shiver down her spine. Seeing him like this, so close and yet so far, it’s agony. It claws at her heart and leaves her feeling empty like he’s already cut her open with his lightsaber and carved out all her insides. Anger fills her up, and she lashes out.

Using Luke’s lightsaber as she would her staff, Rey lunges.

Kylo side-steps her jab in a move that is surprisingly full of grace for one so tall. She catches herself before she falls but almost burns herself on her own saber. She feels the heat from where it had come dangerously close to her leg, and it only fuels her fire. With a sloppy sweep of the lightsaber, Rey twirls and aims for Kylo’s head. He blocks it, red beam sizzling against her blue one and sending sparks into the snow. Rey grits her teeth, diving out of the way as he shifts to an offensive position and forces her to go on defense.

She suspects he’s holding back, that he’d incapacitate her if he really wanted, but in the next second, he descends on her, a flurry of skilled movements that leaves her breathless from trying to keep all her limbs intact. He makes a wide arc that would’ve sliced her in half had she not twist just in time and Kriff, if he’d been going easy on her before, he definitely isn’t now—

Rey remembers the scars covering his body, his words— _“I think I’m a soldier”_. He’s a warrior, she’s sure of it now, as fearsome as any she’s ever met, having no doubt gained those marks on his chest from battles like these. Battles he’s won. From enemies that he’s killed. It strikes her then, hard and fast and vivid, that she is going to die here. That all those dreams had been leading her here, to him, to her death. The little sand scavenger will die in the snow. She hates the idea of it, the fear that slithers up her spine, the way her hands shake in her gloves. She hates _him_ , too, this monster before her and the man under the mask and herself, especially herself, for believing that she might ever be anything more than 'no one'. For a time, when he was by her side and looking at her like she was something beautiful, something special, she’d let herself think she meant something to him. She’d kissed him. She’d let herself believe that he could love her.

Tears wetting her red cheeks, Rey calls the Force and slashes out at Kylo. It’s a messy attack, frenzied and desperate and feral, but it catches him by surprise. He’s quick to move, but not quick enough. He lets out a grunt and falls to the ground, grasping at his helmet.

Rey wipes at her eyes, breathing heavily, shuddering when icy wind meets the sweat on her forehead. She tenses, gripping the hilt of her lightsaber and Kylo Ren moves to take off his mask. She doesn’t want him to. She doesn’t want him to look human, to look like the man she’d saved, the man that she’s falling in—

“Rey,” he whispers, blood dripping down his face from where she’s wounded him. It would’ve been much worse had he not been wearing the helmet, but it’s still a nasty cut going across his face and a bit down his neck. A few bacta patches would probably heal it completely, but nevertheless, the sight of it leaves her feeling ill.

His lightsaber is deactivated and lying by his side, but he doesn’t reach for it. Instead, Kylo holds his hand out to her. He says her name again, so softly, and she wants to sob. It feels like forever since she’s last seen him, last seen his face. She hates the way she misses him.

“You left me!” she yells, loud and screaming over the wind. Anger; it’s all she has left to fight him with, all she has left to keep from crumbling. “You didn’t come back!”

He huffs, pulling himself to his feet. He picks up his lightsaber but doesn’t activate it. “And what? You think I came to Hoth for a tropical vacation?”

She barely hears him, so lost in her own rage. “You said you were going for a walk on Jakku, and then you never came back! I kissed you, and I’ve never kissed anyone before; I’ve done things with you, told you things, given you pieces of myself which I’ve never given to _anyone_ , and _—_ why didn’t you come back _—_ ”

“I remembered who I was,” Kylo interrupts hastily, “I remembered... _everything_ , and I just needed to think, about who I am and what I’ve become. I never thought the stormtroopers would chase you off Jakku, I never _—_ ”

She can feel the pain radiating off him and Rey instinctually shuffles closer. “Ben,” she whispers, and she’s not sure why she calls him that, not when she’d only known him as Kylo when he’d stayed with her on Jakku, but it comes out of her mouth anyway and he goes absolutely still.

His face, usually so expressive, becomes unreadable. They stand, staring at each other as time stretches on and becomes meaningless.

“My parents are here, I felt them when I landed. They told you, then, haven’t they? About me.”

It’s a question they both know the answer to. Nevertheless, Rey nods.

“Then you should know that Ben Solo was already long gone by the time I met you.”

His voice is colder than the breeze at her neck.

Rey lifts her chin defiantly. “I don’t believe you.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t have come out here to fight me.”

“I came out here to get you back,” she says, proud of the way her voice doesn’t wobble, proud of the way she stands her ground, yet is brave enough to be honest, vulnerable.

He blinks, stunned, and then he’s right there, begging entry to her mind, and Rey lets him in. She shows him the visions she’d had of both their pasts, the conclusion she’d come to, his mother pleading for his return. She’s astonished when he drags her into his memories as well; him panicking when he returns to her AT-AT to find it abandoned, and then showing him at the First Order during their time apart, enduring the wraith and torture of a being called Snoke, him running away and stealing a ship and chasing the light all the way across the galaxy, all the way to Hoth, all the way to her.

She wades through his memories, and he lets her go anywhere she wants. She sees him as a pre-teen, awkward and shy, surrounded by the adoring fans of his parents, shrinking away from the noise and the expectations and the little voice in his head that says he’ll never be good enough to carry on the Skywalker legacy. Rey sees him as a baby, powerful and strong in the Force, so much so that it scares Han more than he’d ever willingly admit. She sees him as a teenager, struggling with the darkness, tormented by Snoke. The night Luke tells him that Darth Vader is his grandfather, and Ben latches on to the only person in his family who seems like himself. She sees him as a young man, sleeping, eyelids fluttering as he wakes up to the sight of his uncle leaning over his bed, green lightsaber activated and ready to strike, and a piece of Ben breaks _..._

And then Rey sees herself. It’s disorientating for a moment, and then she recognizes the ship, her position over him, the scene unfolding parallel to her own memory of their first meeting. She flits through their encounters from his point of view, and she finds the exact moment when he’d gotten all his memories back _;_ fighting off the stormtroopers in Tuanul. And still, he’d helped her and Finn escape, hadn’t gone with the First Order when he’d had the chance. He’d gone with her. He’d kissed her. He'd walked out, fully intending to come back. He chose her, Rey could see it, could feel it. Before the chance had been ripped from them, Kylo _—_ Ben _—_ was going to choose her over everything.

Rey swallows, opens her eyes and looks up into his. He’s right in front of her, so close she can touch him if she dares. She doesn’t. She holds her hand out; she lets him make the choice.

“Please, Ben. I...I know that I come from nothing, that I am nothing, no one, but _—_ ”

He takes his glove off. He puts his hand in hers. “Not to me.”

There are snowflakes caught in his hair, his cheeks are pink from the wind, and the hesitant smile Ben Solo gives her is warm enough to melt her all the way from her head down to her cold toes.

“Okay,” he says, jaw set in determination, dark eyes looking out over the horizon. “Let’s go home.”

Home. She’s not sure where home is exactly, where it is that he wants to go. It’s certainly not back on Jakku, among the grit and grime and broken dreams. It’s not on Hoth, among the icy wind and barren snowbanks, even if there are some people back on the Resistance base that are starting to feel like family. It’s not back with the First Order, where the darkness is thick with venom, where a dead master lays in the middle of a throne room. Ben talks of home, but he doesn’t have a home, and neither does she. But then he looks down at her, looks at her like he's known her forever, like she’s the most precious thing in the whole galaxy. He smiles, gently, the smile he only ever has given her, leans down to kiss her, and finally, Rey understands. Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this is it! thank you to everyone who has stayed with me this long, for reviewing and giving kudos and everything, it really means a lot. i was gonna write an epilogue, but i like it a bit open-ended. hope you all enjoyed!!


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